1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to information sharing, and particularly to systems, methods, and computer products for information sharing using personalized index caching.
2. Description of Background
In information sharing scenarios between multiple information nodes hereafter, nodes) connected on a network, for a certain node to search for information on another node, various techniques such as peer-to-peer (P2P) or desktop search technologies through remote operation are employed. However, in all techniques to date, it is assumed that all of the nodes involved at the time of searching are connected to the network (hereafter referred to as online). Accordingly, for nodes not connected to the network (hereafter called “offline”), it is impossible to perform searches, or it is only possible to search for the target (in a text search system, the target is the text) in what is resident in cache.